Whole bunch of policy briefs on African seed systems. Don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to read through the lot, but cursory perusal suggests the following bottom line: the market can’t do it all by itself.

Amazonian farmers?
I am a bit outraged by this – it is not the Amazon, despite us being told so repeatedly. It is about seasonally-flooded coastal wetlands in French Guiana: not in the Amazon watershed and not naturally forested. There is a mass of information for this type of agricultural land-use all round the Caribbean: it generally went out of use as it it is very labour-intensive. From my own experience of savannas in Trinidad there is no point at all in burning them for crop production: the biomass is way too low to provide the needed nutrients. So the burning/Amazon collation – more evident in the press reports than in the paper itself – is a red herring served up by PR people and not scientists. Bunded rice production is a far better option to feed people in seasonally flooded areas. It seems the higher status the journal the more the misrepresentation will happen and the more it will be reported.

Featured Comment May 23, 2016

Åsmund Bjørnstad is not at all daunted by the doubters on the need to reform patents:

First, I entirely agree that “global legal harmonization” is a daunting task… [But] [g]iven that four countries has passed breeding exceptions for patents, that Switzerland adds compulsory licensing to this, and the emergence of private licensing consortia, changes need not be dramatic.